Do Nurses Value Medical History More Than Physicians?
Abstract
Nelson Hendler
In a 2013 study from Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors, reported in the Wall Street Journal, 190 primary care physicians missed 68 diagnoses on their general medicine patients (35.7%) [1]. According to other groups of physicians from Johns Hopkins Hospital, chronic pain patients are misdiagnosed as having sprains, strains and whiplash 40%-80% of the time, when they have some other cause for their pain [2, 3]. Both errors of commission (assigning an erroneous diagnosis to a patient) and errors of omission (neglecting to consider the correct diagnosis) were made. Specific disorders have a misdiagnosis rate ranging from 71% to 97%. As one example, when patients ''diagnosed'' with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (RSD) or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), had a more careful assessment, verified with specific diagnostic tests, the Johns Hopkins Hospital doctors found that 71%-80% of these patients actually had nerve entrapment [4, 5]. Patients who survived electric shock and lightning strike had diagnostic errors of omission and commission 92% of the time [6]. Patients mistakenly called fibromyalgia did not meet the diagnostic criteria 97% of the time [7].